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Comment by ineedasername | Hacker News Reader

Not really a threat. this article is mostly about Looker, which is a very different product with a significantly higher entry level price tag. Tableau on the other hand is part of the curriculum in many information science programs in colleges, and is significantly embedded in the enterprise sector. it will take significant stagnation on Tableua's part or a black swan type of event to dislodge them any time soon.

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"it will take significant stagnation on Tableua's part"

As a former customer of Tableau, it feels like this has already happened right? I worked at a company where many teams used it, and there were zero defenders of Tableua when it came time to decide whether to renew...it's a mess, especially on Mac.

Is there an alternative on Mac?

Any tool that has a purely web based design UI is not limited to an OS, so the alternatives would have to supply a native Mac design tool as Tableau does.

We are working on a cross-platform solution at Chartly. We are still early but can already create dashboards more quickly than what I've seen Tableau do. See https://chart.ly/ for details! :-)

my workplace uses both Cognos and Tableau. compared to cognos, tableau is a dream to use. There's some non overlapping functionality in cognos, but where tableau can be used it is greatly preferred. Coming from that "traditional" enterprise BI, tableau feels anything but stagnant. Spotfire seems like the closest competitor, but its barrier for entry went up sharply after acquisition. Power BI has a ways to go (but I think given the tech stack behind MS is the biggest threat to tableau as it matures long term)

We're going through the process of getting a BI solution. There are many players and Tableau doesn't fair well against them. I can see them holding on to existing customers because switching is hard, but they absolutely have a lot of competition for new sales.

Would you share the ones you found worthwhile? Our business wants PowerBI, but the sys admin side sounds like a pain : it seems we need: 1) a consultant to setup the visualisations 2) either a vm running windows server or create a db on azure to update manually because powerbi doesn't allow aws databases 3) the api automation capabilities are unclear says the expert (eg: create a new dashboard for a new customer ? Update all the visualisations through a script? Etc)

PowerBI feels so Microsoftish, I'm really on the market for something else

Looker's API functionality is pretty extensive if that's something you care a lot about.

PowerBI is really an amazing for the price point (free-ish for O365 accounts) for most businesses out there (10~300 employees). It's not one size fits all and YMMV.

1) You have this problem regardless

2) Huh? Why not just the cloud version? Are you trying to report directly on a productive transactional database for a software app? See #3 about source of data.

3) Depends on your source data. I build a dashboard for sales in with data from SalesForce in like 2 hours.

I'm currently helping a large company with their transition from Tableau/SAP/Excel to Power BI.

The adoption has been extremely painless and business users are very comfortable creating reports and discovering new ways to represent their data.

In response to your points above... 1) A consultant is not required to set up visualisations. With minimal training (a few hours) most users understand the fundamentals and are ready to go.

2) We use AWS Redshift. You have the option to import data into Power BI or do a direct query from the cloud platform to Redshift with odbc.

3) what are you trying to do with the API? To automate reports you normally set up a gateway connection to your data source and schedule the refresh in powerbi cloud. No API required normally.

It also can use office 365 or Azure AD for single sign on, making sys admin activities a breeze.

Send me a message if you want to discuss anything specific and I'd be happy to help you out.

Our business users already hired the consultant and I'm trying to make sense of his answers, but he does seem to be knowledgeable only on using a mouse. We want to create a template dashboard of visualisations, which would be duplicated for each of our customers, each one having its own data source and workspace. New customer creation should be automated through API calls and we would prefer centralize our resources on AWS. That's it. The consultant has been so fuzzy that it seemed utterly complex to set-up, but by reading all the answers things are starting to make sense. Redshift would be great, thanks for the pointer!

> 2) either a vm running windows server or create a db on azure to update manually because powerbi doesn't allow aws databases

I believe this is a misunderstanding. You can totally connect to AWS databases with PowerBI, assuming your AWS database is routable. You can't set up the connection through the web interface, but you can use PowerBI Desktop to set up virtually any database that has an ODBC driver as a source[1]. And once you publish it to the Azure-hosted PowerBI instance, it'll use that connection string to connect directly to the data source and automatically update/refresh like any other data source.

As for a VM running Windows Server - that's the option if your AWS database isn't routable by the Azure-hosted PowerBI service. You install a gateway for PowerBI to hop through, and configure all of the data sources within that gateway. That way your internal AWS databases are not publicly routable, and you can lock down and centralize the connection between PowerBI and AWS via that gateway box[2]. Data Gateway is a Windows-only application at the moment, so that part is a pain. But it's a relatively minor pain in the grand scheme of BI implementations.

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/desktop-connect-to...

[2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/service-gateway-ge...

Yes exactly, so the only way to have a non public database is to run a Windows vm on AWS, I would rather avoid that, especially because we need one vm per customer. Thanks for the detailed write up!

Is there a reason you need one VM per customer, and can't use a single Data Gateway to manage multiple data connections?

On that note, you don't have to use the official data gateway application. It certainly has a lot of ancillary benefits, but isn't critical. You can just as effectively create a bastion linux host and use ssh to remote forward the connection to AWS database[1]. I've done that plenty of times in the past, to access databases like Redshift and Dynamo that were within non-public VPCs. Easier to manage and cheaper to run per client, if that's a hard requirement.

You could also use something like QuickSight, if you're purely AWS. But I'd only recommend that if you expect to allocate a large amount of development resources for support. PowerBI is a lot more user friendly for business users to be self-sufficient, and sometimes it's less of a hassle to deal with the up-front complexity of that than to deal with the non-stop application support needs of business users.

[1] https://www.ssh.com/ssh/tunneling/example#sec-Remote-Forward...

1) nope, it's a 100% self service tool, no outside assistance needed.

2) PowerBI uses AWS just fine, you may need a gateway depending on how you expose your AWS DB for external access, but that'd be true of any tool connecting to it.

3) why an expert? Here's the API spec, it's not hiding ...

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/power-bi/

Many thanks for the API link, the expert was completely unclear on what may be possible on the automation side (full api configuration without using a mouse).

Hello Tensor! Will you like to review what our team has built at Holistics (www.holistics.io)? We are listed in the Gartner FrontRunner Quadrant for Business Intelligence Oct 2018.

Here's a customer case study we've just published recently: https://www.holistics.io/customers/floship-ecommerce-fulfill...

Love to get your feedback on how you find us relative to the tools you are currently evaluating! Send me a note at v(@@)holistics.io or our team at hello(@@)holistics.io]!

Bit of anecdata: I used Looker in a previous gig, where we used it mostly a development tool for constructing and optmising difficult queries. The business continued to use Tableau for BI.

How did you use Looker to optimize queries?

2k hook in for the license and then charging half a mil for actually implementing your data and biz model?

Do you mean that as Tableau's cost? Not where I'm at. And maybe you'd have to pay half a mil to implement a data model if you're hiring consultants and starting from scratch, but if you're in such a state that's going to be a cost no matter the product. No product is going to model your data for you or build something like a semantic layer. Those are (mostly) completely separate tasks from the BI layer. Where I'm at we simply pointed Tableau at existing data sources built for performance reporting already.

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